Nintendo 64 Emulator?

[Console_Master]

I tried running a 64 emu on my first rig back in 2002-2003 (2.7Ghz AMD with 3g of ram) and it was awful, most games ran at about 15 to maybe 20 fps

There's no way. I've run plenty of N64 games on an 800Mghz P3, 512MB ram, blah blah blah. It must have been your emulator/settings causing that. On a 2.7Ghz AMD ANYTHING, the emulator should be running TOO fast, even for something as complex as perfect dark. I have a 2.2Ghz AMD athlon 64 3500+ and I can run DREAMCAST perfectly fine on this thing, so you must have been using terrible settings, or a bad emulator.

Or something less powerful than a Geforce 3

or you were running the emulator in interpreter mode, instead of dynarec.

Not saying that a 2.7Ghz couldn't do it just saying that emulating it is a bitch and to my knowledge it really doesn't matter what vid card you have since all the processing is done buy the CPU (run a genesis emulator and watch your CPU Activity it should be through the roof). Again those were the early days of N64 emulation I've done it recently and have no issues, but I still think that it's gonna be a real bitch for the Wiz to do 64 emulation (if it ever does it) seeing that it took quite a while for PC's to even begin emulating SNES and Genesis games.

 

[Exophase]

Not saying that a 2.7Ghz couldn't do it just saying that emulating it is a bitch and to my knowledge it really doesn't matter what vid card you have since all the processing is done buy the CPU (run a genesis emulator and watch your CPU Activity it should be through the roof).

Not with N64 emulators, where the RDP coprocessor is emulated by the video card.

Again those were the early days of N64 emulation I've done it recently and have no issues, but I still think that it's gonna be a real bitch for the Wiz to do 64 emulation (if it ever does it) seeing that it took quite a while for PC's to even begin emulating SNES and Genesis games.

Actually, the early N64 emulators like UltraHLE, Corn, Nemu64, and others, while not having great compatibility and having a lot of hacks, ran acceptably on machines that existed when they were released. These emulators came out around 1999 and ran pretty well on Pentium 2 300+MHz CPUs with Voodoo 2 or TNT level video cards. N64 emulators got somewhat slower as they became more robust, and some games require more to emulate.

I wouldn't say it took a while for PCs to begin emulating SNES or Genesis either, with significant work having been underway by 1995-96 and pretty good emulators out by 1997. If anything held them back it was lack of information, particular for the sound chip in SNES. These days this is a solved problem.

Of course, N64 emulation still probably won't happen because Wiz is pretty damn weak and doesn't have an FPU. I would never expect it to be competitive with a Pentium 2 300MHz.

 

[Gavendortt]

Me, I'm sure the N64 emulation will come on the Wiz.
Check, the PSP can hold some games like Goldeneye and Mario 64, why the Wiz, with a best processor and a capacity to run PSX with a relatively good FPS for the moments only, can't old that thing?
And it's not true, a PC with a Intel 815 integrated graphic card and a Ciryx or something processor can old N64 emulation at a good FPS (~35-40) with Conker Bad Fur Day. And for the buttons problems, if the cradle is released, all the problems will be out. You will be able to play N64 with Wiz on the TV with a good PC controller. Also, somme games dont need all buttons to play (Smash Bros, Diddy Kong racing, ...), then we just have to set the buttons to another buttons on the Wiz, and just ignore the others.

PS : Just for information, I'm not good with english speak!

 

[renejr902]

i played mario and zelda 64 with my old pentium 200 mmx with a voodoo1. ( Corn emulator was very fast, )

hey exophase, are you sure in UltraHle emulation we cant get a n64 with good speed. i know a lot of games are not compatible Hle emulation, but its better than nothing ?

if its not possible i suppose the gfx (hardware) of the wiz is pretty weak in quality. even a savage card with a pentium 200 can run mariokart64 with Corn in decent speed.

 

[DaveC]

i played mario and zelda 64 with my old pentium 200 mmx with a voodoo1. ( Corn emulator was very fast, )

hey exophase, are you sure in UltraHle emulation we cant get a n64 with good speed. i know a lot of games are not compatible Hle emulation, but its better than nothing ?

if its not possible i suppose the gfx (hardware) of the wiz is pretty weak in quality. even a savage card with a pentium 200 can run mariokart64 with Corn in decent speed.

I am not Exophase but I am sure that playable N64 is not possible on the Wiz.

No FPU = no N64. Soft floats would be WAY too slow among other things.

Also ARM does NOT equal Pentium, not even close even if the Pentium is running at 100 MHz.

Even PSX which is much simpler is only half speed with no sound on the Wiz, N64 is not going to happen on Wiz, forget it. please.

 

[xXJackXx]

just throwing more fuel on the fire here.

lack of buttons i don't think is a problem if you used the USB host........

 

[shinneri]

Buttons don't matter at all. The L and Z could be mapped both to the L button since they are almost never both used. N64 has no select button, so that could be C-Up. A, B, C-Down and C-Left could be mapped to face buttons. That only leaves C-Right missing, which could just be mapped in when it's needed.

Anyway, talk of button mapping is premature. Though I think that N64 is possible on Wiz from a technical standpoint, I agree with DaveC that it's unlikely to occur.

 

[renejr902]

i cant believe the wiz has no fpu. its really weak. but if i remember correctly the pandora will have a great fpu right ?

ok i forget about the n64 emu for wiz. anyway i understand that its not possible, at least not at a playable level, just for a technical demo. so i forget it. Lock this topic please. LOL.

 

[Exophase]

Pandora's FPU sucks. But it's better than nothing. It has SIMD FPU, though, which is better than an normal FPU if you utilize it correctly.

 

[renejr902]

at least it have one

 

[Enverex]

Pandora's FPU sucks. But it's better than nothing. It has SIMD FPU, though, which is better than an normal FPU if you utilize it correctly.

Little confused by this sentence, it sucks but it's better than a normal FPU? (assuming it's used correctly). Does that not mean that all FPUs suck? (and such compared to what?). Sorry, just trying to figure out what is meant exactly.

 

[craigix]

The Pandroa FPU is 'lite' it is only good at single precision if i remember correctly, and double will slow things down.

It's not a disaster though, it can handle quake3 for example.

 

[fusion_power]

The Pandroa FPU is 'lite' it is only good at single precision if i remember correctly, and double will slow things down.

It's not a disaster though, it can handle quake3 for example.

Sounds somehow not very promising for the Future of FP-based programms onto this device. Do actualy every ARM based Architecture has float point problems? I often read this when ARM-based processors are talked about or it is complicated to realize or it just don't work like the coders want it to work or such things. Are x86 Architectures generaly more FP friendly or just more easy to code for?

 

[Enverex]

The Pandroa FPU is 'lite' it is only good at single precision if i remember correctly, and double will slow things down.

It's not a disaster though, it can handle quake3 for example.

Sounds somehow not very promising for the Future of FP-based programms onto this device. Do actualy every ARM based Architecture has float point problems? I often read this when ARM-based processors are talked about or it is complicated to realize or it just don't work like the coders want it to work or such things. Are x86 Architectures generaly more FP friendly or just more easy to code for?

From reading previous threads, most ARM processors either don't have an FPU or use this NEON style instead.

 

[Exophase]

Pandora's FPU sucks. But it's better than nothing. It has SIMD FPU, though, which is better than an normal FPU if you utilize it correctly.

Little confused by this sentence, it sucks but it's better than a normal FPU? (assuming it's used correctly). Does that not mean that all FPUs suck? (and such compared to what?). Sorry, just trying to figure out what is meant exactly.

No, no....

Pandora has two units here, VFP-lite and NEON. VFP-lite is what does the FPU operations - when you use floats or doubles in C it'll usually get turned into this code. NEON does vector FPU operations (yes, the one NOT called VFPU does vector operations, confusing I know), meaning that it does multiple at a time, always. It's not IEEE compliant and it only does single precision floating point values, but its performance is fine. VFP-lite's performance sucks, regardless of whether or not you use floats, doubles, or "run fast" mode - if you use run fast mode floats it just sucks slightly less.

You can force NEON to be used for scalar operations in a hacking sense, but the problem is that you end up throwing away half the register file, you only get single precision non-IEEE compliant operations, and transferring from NEON to ARM general purpose registers or memory that ARM will load from soon (like the same region of the stack) is super slow. This isn't going to necessarily fit well with everything the compiler generates, especially so long as it uses soft-FPU as a calling convention. On the other hand, since NEON and VFP share the same register file, you can basically use the results interchangably between them. Actually, that should also mean that all of the transfer negatives I described apply to VFP as well.

Short answer: normal FPU on Pandora sucks, SIMD (if you don't know what this means go look it up) FPU doesn't, trying to use the SIMD FPU as a normal FPU is possible but with some caveats and don't expect the compiler to do it automatically (yet).

Also, a lot of more recent ARM devices, like a lot of ARM11 ones, DO have VFP in hardware and they also have one that DOESN'T suck. Meaning that if you take this code and port it to Cortex-A8 you're going to see much worse performance than you expected. This has already been happening in some select iPhone 3GS benchmarks vs iPhone 3G.

 

[guilmon999]

i think the wiz can because if you look at the psp it can emulate the n64 at about 15 to 20 frames per seconds and it only has a 333mhz processor and 64mb of ram and that is only the higher end games like legend of zelda the wiz has 555mhz cpu and i think 64mb of ram i think it can handle a n64 emulator

 

[Dunny]

i think the wiz can because if you look at the psp it can emulate the n64 at about 15 to 20 frames per seconds and it only has a 333mhz processor and 64mb of ram and that is only the higher end games like legend of zelda the wiz has 555mhz cpu and i think 64mb of ram i think it can handle a n64 emulator

It's not as simple as that.

The Wiz doesn't have the hardware to emulate it fast enough. I'd be very surprised if it can emulate the N64 faster than the PSP can - the PSP may well have hardware better suited to N64 emulation than the Wiz does. Just because the Wiz has 200mhz more CPU power does not mean it will do better, as the PSP will utilise other hardware available to take the load off the CPU. If the Wiz doesn't have similar extra hardware then it will struggle to keep up.

D.

 

[beavith]

People need to read the previous posts, before aking questions that have been answerd. Or, is that too much to ask?

 

[b1ueskycomp1ex]

i think the wiz can because if you look at the psp it can emulate the n64 at about 15 to 20 frames per seconds and it only has a 333mhz processor and 64mb of ram and that is only the higher end games like legend of zelda the wiz has 555mhz cpu and i think 64mb of ram i think it can handle a n64 emulator

When are people going to learn that clock speeds between different processors mean nothing. Remember the good old days when AMD was marketing their athlon 64 processors as "3000+, 3500+", etc.? They were trying to say that in most cases their 2.2ghz processors were faster than intel's 3Ghz processors, and for the most part, they were. You can't compare clock speeds alone against another processor. That's like saying you've got a 2.5Ghz celeron and it's going to be anywhere near equal to a 2.5Ghz pentium 4. it just isn't. Not only that, but there are things like graphics processors, ram speeds, bus speeds, etc., that make it insanely difficult to say that X amount of Mhz here translates to X amount of Mhz there.

Hopefully that clears up the whole "this is running at X Mhz faster than This, therefore this is faster." argument.

 

[NatDuv]

And the wiz doesn't have enough buttons

Touchscreen